If you’ve never had a “real job” before and you’re either not old enough or not available or not able to get a paying position, work for free. Go to an office, a golf course, a community center, a museum, and ask if you can help out every Saturday, or Tuesdays and Thursdays after school.

It doesn’t have to be official volunteer work, though it can be. Or it can be at your mom’s office or your dad’s store. The idea is that it will expose you to the post-educational world, give you a taste of what it’s like to have a job, and teach you the ways of the work environment.

You will get an idea of what you like to do, what you can do, what you are truly good at. This is not something you can learn from reading a book or taking a class. There is no substitute for life experience here. 

Plus, since you are going to do an excellent job, when the time comes to get real work, you have someone who can vouch for you, who can recommend you to a potential employer and help you land that paying gig. Which means that even though this position didn’t pay you in dollars, you got something out of it. So it wasn’t really working for free, was it? 

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This entry was posted on Thursday, October 1st, 2009 at 9:45 pm and is filed under career advice. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.